The Living Cathedral of Knowledge

Secreting a shell

Snail by Annette Meyer from Pixabay

We may intuit a “complex, dense and ‘cathedral-like’ structure of the highly educated and articulate personality.” We may suppose we each carry our own “personally constructed and unique version” of our heritage. I read this years ago, and the idea kept resurfacing, though I couldn’t recall the exact words nor where I’d misplaced the citation.

This person was talking about “the West,” the very concept of which is amorphous and debatable and the privileging of which certainly ought to be challenged. But that’s not what drew my attention initially. I wondered:

• Does each of us have a personal mission regarding the information we try to obtain and produce?
• Does each of us try to define what information is culturally our own, separating out the subject matter we expect to absorb, hope to contribute to, and feel responsible toward?
• Do we design our learning to shut out whatever we believe does not belong to it or can’t be contained by it?
• Does learning, for each of us, rise architecturally, a mix of form and function, shaping our unique personalities?
• Does our edifice look cleaner and simpler than our real life?
• Does it represent a special value?
• Is the idea of “West” projecting an idea of “East”?
• Are the trappings of our built identity part of our extended mind?
• Do we give a thick description of the context?

It happens through small actions on a small scale. The mind builds a house as the body does: brick by brick. “You pile up associations the way you pile up bricks. Memory itself,” said Louise Bourgeois, “is a form of architecture.”

But don’t think only about the bricks, Bernard K. Forscher wrote 60 years ago. “A pile of bricks” is not the same as “a true edifice.”

Then, it grows. Maybe vertically, because it was built under a hierarchy and it wants always to remind you of the hierarchy from which it came. And maybe you find yourself treading on “a great, rounded system of anchorings, built on foundational firmaments, the basic cultural ideas,” which are “fictitious” but nonetheless would undoubtedly be…